Ansca Mobile today launched the upgraded Corona SDK and Corona Game Edition toolkits for mobile app and game development.

Corona SDK (software development kit) adds cross-platform capabilities to the previously iPhone-only Corona toolkit. Developers now can use Corona to build apps for iOS and Android devices from the same set of code, saving considerable time on recoding for different mobile platforms. On top of that, Corona SDK automatically scales graphics for each separate platform, saving users the time and effort of manually rescaling their assets between devices.

"Developers now want to build their apps for multiple platforms," says Ansca Mobile co-founder/CTO Walter Luh. "With the new versions of Corona, we are making it easier, quicker, and less costly for developers to target multiple platforms while still maintaining utmost quality and performance in their apps."

Corona Game Edition includes the same cross-platform capabilities as Corona SDK with expanded features for building more demanding mobile games. Game Edition touts OpenFeint integration for easily adding social networking capabilities to games, sprite sheets for advanced texture handling, and a full-fledged physics engine. Last month, OpenFeint even featured Doodle Dash! an iPhone game made with a beta version of Game Edition as their Free Game of the Day. Doodle Dash! eventually netted over 160,000 downloads and a spot on the App Store's Top 25 list of most downloaded apps.

"Game Edition makes advanced game development easier than anyone has done before," says Evan Kirchhoff, Senior Software Engineer at Ansca Mobile. "Nobody has ever made it possible to integrate physics in just five lines of code, which usually takes thousands of lines that's a concrete example of why Corona is the most time-efficient and cost-effective way of building games!"